Domino (The Domino Trilogy) (32 page)

Hmm.
Curiouser and curiouser.
I decided to go for the jugular. “If you had to hazard a guess as to what Peter had to do with all of this, what would you say?”

“Can this stay strictly off the record?”

“Of course. I won’t quote you directly.” Though I wasn’t going to guarantee that I wouldn’t refer to it in some way. Especially if the information was good.

“All right. I think that if I had to bet money, some of Peter’s business contacts back in the old country are in the human trafficking business, and they were using him---and consequently, me---to track how well they were getting around the federal regulations, and to identify potential problem areas, so they could take the necessary precautions.”

“Why do you think that?” I was already connecting the dots myself based on my conversation with Rostovich that morning, but I wanted to hear his take on it.

“Because I know for a fact that Peter has associated with some sleazy people over the years. He’s not sleazy himself per se, but I do question some of the ways he’s chosen to make a living and support his art. Plus there’s the matter of some of his photography models.”

“You mean the models depicted in your shuttered gallery show?”

“Yes. Most of the girls in those photos are Russian. Or Ukrainian, or whatever---I can’t tell the difference half the time. But where does he find them? I’m guessing he gets them the same way some fat
middle-aged slob from Texas finds a wife. From a mail-order broker.”

“I see.
But you don’t have any actual proof of that?”

Darling sighed.
“No, not at all. It’s just a hunch I have. Oh, and there’s something else you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“Listen to me very carefully, Ms. Delaney.” I noticed that he’d lowered his voice several decibels. “Peter is an unusual man with unusual tastes. He has certain, ahem, proclivities when it comes to women. He can be very insistent when it comes to satisfying those proclivities. And women who have been unable to satisfy him have often found themselves in a bad way. Not injured or harmed, per se---at least not physically. But I would say they wound up with way more than they bargained for out of the deal. And not in a good way. I would very strongly advise you to proceed with extreme caution when it comes to Peter. Because if you ever fail him---or even if you don’t, and he just thinks you have---you will pay dearly for your transgression. Trust me. I know this for personal experience.”

“So you’re paying dearly now for a transgression of your own? Is that what you’re saying?”

“You could.”

I was getting sick of these half-baked, evasive answers. It was high time to lift the veil.
“So what did you do to him? How did you fail Peter Rostovich?”

“I honestly don’t know for sure. I only know that whatever it was, I’m paying for it now.”

Well, that was rather anticlimactic. I tried a different tack. “You never said exactly what it was that led you out here to Cleveland from New York.”

“You could say I wanted a change of
scene,” he replied. “Things have gotten very hard in New York since the recession hit. My gallery there---which I ran in partnership with someone else---folded. There just weren’t enough buyers, and prices were dropping even while our overhead was skyrocketing. I thought I could come out here to Cleveland where there’s less competition and the overhead was cheaper. It’s been a struggle this past year, and I was really hoping Peter’s show would be what put Flaming River Gallery over the top. But the opposite ended up happening.”

“Have you considered that the notoriety you’ve received from this incident might actually help your gallery in the long run?”
“I have considered that, but in the short run it’s probably too late to save things. I’m deep in debt, to both Peter Rostovich and many other people, not to mention the landlord and the gas company.”

“So
Rostovich funded your gallery?”

“Not directly. But I wouldn’t have been able to open it without his connections, not to mention his buying out of my share of the old gallery in New York. Plus he offered to let me show his latest exhibit for free. He waived his usual upfront fee in exchange for a percentage of the overall sales.
Assuming of course we met a minimum revenue level, which we aren’t going to meet now.”

“
Fair enough. But why Cleveland, and not Toledo, or Milwaukee, or Kansas City? You still haven’t answered that completely. And what kind of connections does Peter have here?”

“Cleveland seemed like as good a place as any. As far as Peter’s connections, he has them everywhere. It doesn’t really matter where he is. The thing is, Ms. Delaney, when you’re talking about the super-elite, location is entirely relative.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Still, my gut told me Darling was hiding something. I decided to leave the Cleveland question for another day. It was time to wrap the interview while I still had his respect. “Well, Mr. Darling, I would like to thank you for speaking with me today.”

“I hope what I said is helpful. And I’d just like to add one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Watch your back.” With that, he hung up without saying goodbye. I stared at the dead receiver for a moment or two, then replaced it into its charger.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
, I thought to myself as I digested all that Darling had said. He’d revealed so much and yet so little at the same time. I’d already known that Rostovich was mysterious and mixed up in strange, otherworldly things before I talked to Darling. Now I just had yet more evidence of the same. What didn’t fit with the rest was where the trafficked Russian women and the models who had fucked in public fit into everything. They were a red herring that didn’t match the rest of the picture.

So I decided to go back to the picture. Or rather, pictures. I scrolled through the latest set of images
Rostovich had sent over on the iPad, looking for something I might have missed the first, second, or third times. I scrolled through the images again and again, searching in vain until the details went blurry before my eyes. Just when I was about to give up, I noticed something on the final image in the set.

The last image in the latest
set had me puzzled. It was nearly identical to one of the other images that Peter had printed and blown up to large size, a closeup of that same tan apartment block that reminded me of sand dunes. But it was shot at a very strange angle that made the building appear as if it were floating in space. I kept turning the iPad this way and that, trying to right the image, but the motion sensors just kept moving the image along with the tablet, effectively keeping the image static. I went to the Settings menu and after a moment or two of fiddling, figured out how to turn the motion sensors off so I could realign the photo. When I held the iPad at a forty-five degree angle, the building appeared upright. And that’s when I found what I was looking for.

In the far lower right-hand corner, behind some half-dead shrubbery, scrap metal and other assorted junk, I saw a shadow. A shadow shaped like a person. Or more specifically, a young woman.

I stretched the image out with two fingers, zooming in. At 200% resolution, it ceased to be a shadow and became a real person, albeit a very blurry and distorted version of one. But clear enough that I could make out hair color and facial features, despite the poor contrast and pixilation. The woman’s hair was a deep magenta red, obviously dyed. Despite the photo lighting and the building’s own shadow, I could tell that her skin was very fair, almost translucent, and she had deep-set dark eyes and the trademark high cheekbones of Central Asian peoples, along with a long, lithe figure that resembled a ballerina’s. I couldn’t quite make out all the details, but there was something eerily familiar about her. And she wore an odd expression----her eyes were flung wide, as if in shock, and her mouth gaped like an open wound.

I stretched the image two more times, until the zoom was up to almost 400%. The image became far more pixilated then, but I
still could make out more detail at that size, including the shape of the woman’s mouth. There was something familiar about her, but what? I could have sworn I’d seen her somewhere before, but of course that was impossible. I’d never been to Sevastopol, of course. And I wasn’t entirely convinced that this image was of a real person. For all I knew, she was Photoshopped in or something, perhaps another one of Rostovich’s artistic sleights of hand designed to confuse and deceive.

Then it dawned on me.
I
had
seen that woman before. Live and in the flesh. And very, very recently.

The shadowy woman in the photograph was the same woman I’d seen fucked up the ass at the Flamin
g River Gallery just a few days earlier. Even though the woman I’d seen at the gallery was naked and covered with body paint at the time, I could still see the resemblance. I never forgot a face. My elementary school psychologist had diagnosed me with a photographic memory when I was six, and it had always served me well.

I stretched the image a bit more and squinted hard at it, just to be sure.
Yes, there was no question it was the same woman. But there was something else I hadn’t noticed before, something that sent my mind spinning in a million different directions.

The woman had a knife stuck in her chest.
A splash of deep red that I’d previously mistaken as part of the woman’s dyed hair looked like blood now. It was almost impossible to make it out without magnifying the image, and I supposed it was also possible it was just a trick of the light. But my gut told me it was a knife, driven deep into her chest, gushing gore, and the expression on that woman’s face wasn’t just a look of shock---it was a look of death.

I abruptly dropped the iPod onto the bed, feeling as if I’d suddenly grabbed a hot poker business end first.

Oh my. This was strange. Nothing about it made sense. At least, not in the real world. If I were living in a surreal erotic novel from the 1960s, maybe it would. But not here, not now. Not in Cleveland in the twenty-first century. Jesus H. Christ, what had I gotten myself into?

As if on cue, Hannah appeared in my doorway, looking groggy. Groggy and mad. “Nancy, who the hell are these two German dudes and what are they doing here?”

I spun around. “Oh, um, they’re just---um, private security.” I said this as if I were referring to a new pair of shoes, or maybe yesterday’s newspaper.

“Private security?”

I sank down onto my bed and put my face in my hands. “You don’t even want to know,” I muttered through my fingers.

“Jesus, Nancy, what the hell is going on?”

“This is all your fault, you know. If you hadn’t insisted I cover that damned Rostovich opening for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Yeah, and you’d still be a virgin, too.”

I looked up and glared at her. “Touché.”

She sat down beside me on the bed. “So I’m assuming the private security, as you call them, come
s courtesy of Mr. Rostovich?”

“Yeah.”

Hannah clucked. “Good lord. The man certainly lives up to his reputation, I’ll give him that. My editors are gonna have a field day with this.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to mention the private security stuff in the article.”
“Why not?”

I rolled my eyes. “Wouldn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of having security in the first place?
”

Hannah shrugged. “I
dunno. Maybe. But then whenever I pick up a copy of
Life & Style
they always show pictures of Heidi Klum with her bodyguard, so maybe not. How long are those guys going to be here?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing indefinitely.”

“
Indefinitely
? What the hell? Are they going to
live
here?”

“I don’t know. Peter didn’t exactly say.”

Her eyes widened. “Wow. So you two are on a first-name basis now and everything.”

“Well, we did have sex.”

Hannah took both my hands in hers. “Nancy, are you sure you’re all right? Is there anything you want to talk about? I’m concerned about you.”

“I’m fine,” I lied.
I was nowhere near fine, actually. But what else could I say? That on one level, I resented Hannah for her role in getting me mixed up in this whole mess in the first place, but at another I was secretly thrilled and wanted even more? And that if I did get more, it was probably going to keep affecting her, and I didn’t much care about that? I couldn’t say any of that out loud. She’d think I was crazy, or callous, or worse.

She squeezed my hands hard. “If you say so. But if you need to talk about anything, just let me know. In the meantime, I’m going to offer these two guards of yours some lunch. The one in the hallway keeps staring at the fridge and it’s kind of creeping me out.”

Hannah got up and left. I picked up the iPad again, wanting to check and see if I’d imagined the whole stabbed-Russian-model thing. But the thing was dead. I flicked the switch, plugged it into the charger, tried to restart it----nothing. It was dead. Fried. Kaput.

Dammit
, I barely even got to use this damn thing
, I seethed. What the hell? Then I glanced over at my desktop computer. Peter had warned me not to use it, but I had a strange sense of forboding all of a sudden. I had to see if my gut feeling was right.